“Technology innovation will be vitally important to evaluate and fully activate the intricacies of what’s contained within this large volume of data – and storage in particular will continue to grow in importance, as it provides the foundation from which so many of these emerging technologies will be served.”

This data-driving trend will affect essentially every enterprise, the white paper indicates. The report goes on to note the main drivers in the shift from primarily consumer-led to enterprise-driven data.

One driver is the evolution of data from business background to life critical. By 2025, the report predicts that nearly 20% of the data in the global datasphere will be classed as critical to daily life.

Another driver is the rise of true mobile and real-time data. The paper predicts that by 2025 more than a quarter of data created will be real-time in nature, and IoT real-time data will constitute over 95% of it.

The report highlights the move of the bulk of data from traditional sources to automation and machine-to-machine technologies as another driver.

Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate, comments, “while we can see from this new research that the era of Big Data is upon us, the value of data is really not in the ‘known’, but in the ‘unknown’ where we are vastly underestimating the potentials today.”

“What is really exciting are the analytics, the new businesses, the new thinking and new ecosystems from industries like robotics and machine-to-machine learning, and their profound social and economic impact on our society.”

Luczo adds, “the opportunity for today’s enterprises and tomorrow’s entrepreneurs to capture the value of data is tremendous, and our global business leaders will be exploring these opportunities for decades to come.”

The report states that while data creation in the previous 10 years has been characterised primarily by an increase in entertainment content, the coming decade will reflect the shift to productivity-driven and embedded data, as well as non-entertainment images and video such as surveillance and advertising.